I’ve written about Apple’s OS X many times before, and it’s no secret that I’ve long been impressed with Apple’s operating systems. This month, I reviewed the MacBook Air, which gave me the opportunity to spend some quality time with Apple’s latest OS, Leopard, and I had an epiphany: Windows users are in the same exact position that Mac users were in 1999.

In Win can’t resist building gimmicks into its chassis. We first encountered the company’s design oddities with its F430 case (reviewed July 2008), which emits the superloud sound of a car engine when you hit the power button. The company’s B2 chassis isn’t quite as ostentatious—unless you think the motorized front panel that conceals the drive bays is over the top.

Fans of Star Wars and Star Trek finally have a role-playing game that’s worthy of their love. Mass Effect takes the most compelling themes and ideas of both franchises and mind-melds them into one of the best science fiction games we’ve ever played.

The full review of this stellar science-fiction epic is after the jump!

We were excited when LG’s W2452T arrived in the Lab—we had high hopes this monitor would break the streak of middle-of-the-road 24-inch displays we’ve tested lately. And it nearly did. Although the 1920x1200-res screen was able to hit the grayscale extremes on our DisplayMate tests, this functionality came at a horrible price: noticeable compression when given an increased range of grayscales to work with.

Is bigger always better? Not necessarily. Qnap’s TS-409 Pro is packed with the same features as the company’s TS-109 Pro (http://tinyurl.com/yomys5) but includes twice as much memory and supports four hard drives rather than just one. And it rocks, but only if we compare it to similarly sized foes, such Buffalo’s four-drive TeraStation Live.

But how does it stack up to single-drive NAS boxes? Find out after the jump.

We never said water cooling was simple, and Cooler Master’s Aquagate Max doesn’t make the delicate assembly process any easier. But once you connect your last run of 3/8-inch tubing to this beastly setup, you’ll have accomplished two goals: doubling your geek cred and giving your processor an awesome heap of non-peltier cooling.

It doesn’t matter a lick to us that Blu-ray has prevailed in the high-def format war if the hardware remains expensive and uninspiring. We have to admit, we thought the tide was turning when we reviewed LG’s GGW-H20L Blu-ray burner back in December. That drive represented a dramatic price drop (falling to $500 from its predecessor’s $1,200 price tag in a matter of months—and now settled at $400 MSRP), and its 6x rating for BD-R media resulted in burn times we could actually live with (22.5GB in a little over 20 minutes).

Sadly, Lite On has not followed LG’s lead. Instead, they've released a drive that's made zero strides since its aged predecessor.

There’s a civil war brewing within the PC: Intel says the CPU is the head honcho while Nvidia argues that the GPU is boss. With its Deluge-i A2, Puget shows whose side it’s taking in this debate. This budget gaming box spends big on the videocard but skimps on the processor.

You can change CPU sockets, dump PCI, and jettison legacy ports all day long, but nothing, absolutely nothing, pisses people off like moving to a new type of RAM. Luckily, there’s a fallback: dual-format RAM motherboards such as MSI’s P35 Combo Platinum board.

Let us lay out a hypothetical situation for you: You’ve been driving that lumbering old Crown Vic since Ken Starr was culturally relevant. It’s clunky, not particularly fast, and prone to breakdowns, and it lacks any sort of sex appeal. But you’re used to it, and it’s not like you’re made of money, right? Suddenly your benevolent (and extremely wealthy) uncle calls you up and offers you a Tesla roadster. It’s fast, sleek, and technologically advanced, runs without gasoline, and is sexy as all get-out. And he’s giving it to you for free. Do you take it?

Hell yeah, you take it. And if Uncle Mozilla offers you a fast, light, open-source, wildly configurable, sexy web browser, you take that too. Internet Explorer’s a clunker, and if you’ve somehow managed to go the past four years without switching to the roadster that is Firefox, it’s high time to take a test drive. If you’re already a Firefox user, well, here comes your supercharger.